One foot in front of the other

The days that followed were a complete struggle. The week after that fateful day, I stayed in Philadelphia for another week to help my father. But, it didn’t take long for him to shoo me away to go back home. I relented, but I had no idea just how difficult it would be to resume life.

This was pretty much what happened the first week:
Day 1: Wake up, start crying . . . crawl back into bed.
Day 2: Wake up, start crying . . . crawl back into bed.
Day 3: Wake up, brush my teeth, start crying . . . crawl back into bed.
Day 4: Wake up, brush my teeth, take a shower, start crying . . . crawl back into bed.
Day 5: Wake up, brush my teeth, take a shower, get dressed, start crying . . .
Day 6: Wake up, force myself through the day.

I am grateful that at the time, my job was completely understanding of everything I was going through and the difficulty I was having resuming my daily routine. Unless you actually go through the loss of a mother, you truly have no idea how heart wrenching and painful the experience. And it makes no difference if you’re best friends or almost mortal enemies with your mother when she dies because the bottom line is that she’s gone, you’re here and that’s that.

During that time, if it hadn’t been for my friends, I really don’t know what I would have done. Anything and everything that had to do with daily life and existing was incredibly difficult for me. Truly, I didn’t want to exist. I wanted more than anything else to trade places – and I gladly would have done that. Selfish as it may sound . . . I didn’t want to be here. I didn’t want to be in so much pain and have to be here. My father had retreated into his own depression, my brother was emotionally unavailable when it came to the topic of my mother. Talking to my aunts, uncles or cousins wasn’t really a comfort to me, either. I’d felt like a child who didn’t know how to find her way anymore.

The weeks that followed got easier. The crying wasn’t every minute, the inability to move wasn’t so powerful. The pain wasn’t as gripping and debilitating. However, today . . . almost eight years later, there are those days when it feels like it just happened; where the pain is that huge and the inability to move that powerful. And it is then when I have to remember I can allow myself to feel all of that, but I cannot be paralyzed indefinitely. I’ll never get over the pain of my mother’s death or the sheer fact that she’s gone. Anyone who expects that or tells me that I should get over it is out of his or her mind. But what is important is to let go of the grief and my mother. I know that sounds weird, but it’s true. And it’s taken me eight years to learn that lesson. I couldn’t truly move forward until I let her go.